Publisher's Summary

In this intoxicating novel, Frederica falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, while tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life and those of the people she loves.

In the late 1960s, the world begins to split. The languages of religion, myth, and fairytale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. The meaning of love itself seems to vanish and people flounder, often comically, while searching for their true sexual, intellectual, and emotional identities.

Through the author's wayward, lovingly drawn characters and breathtaking twists of plot, she illuminates the effervescence of the 1960s, both its excitements and its dangers, as no one has done before.

I made myself listen to the end of the first part of this 3 part audio book. I had been so excited to find it on Audible since I read and loved Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt. But this book is about discrimination against women and the abuse and even murder of wives and children. The book tells the stories of innumerable women and men whose lives demonstrated the evils caused by this kind of horror and discrimination. Their stories are linked by the smallest threads and tell of lives of desperation or sacrifice. Byatt seemed to be saying a woman could have a servile marriage or have a career. I began my career in the 60s and had to admit more than once that I had chosen the wrong man, but in the 60s a woman could make changes, and with right man, it was possible to have a meaningful career and a good marriage. I did not want to revisit the darkest days of the feminist movement and have never been willing to believe that the horrors visited upon women and children were the result of that movement. The horrors were always there. The feminist movement only finally gave us the power to change our own lives. Perhaps the second and third parts of the book gave some hope to those desperate lives, but I didn’t get that far.